Joe Rogan’s Audience Learns That Climate Hysteria Set Back Real Science by 50 Years
Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. William Happer cover the sound reasons for climate science skepticism, the politicization of research funding, and the limitations of current climate models.
Legal Insurrection readers may remember my many references to my CO2 Coalition colleague Dr. William Happer.
I often refence his work when reviewing the latest climate crisis narrative being pushed by the minion media. In one of my most recent pieces, I noted Happer (Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University) asserts that increasing amounts of the life-essential gas boosts crop yields.
Happer appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience (#2397) this week, alongside Richard Lindzen, a retired MIT professor of atmospheric sciences. The episode centered on sound reasons for climate science skepticism, the politicization of research funding, and the limitations of current climate models. In other words, a very large audience of potentially less-than-reliably informed people were treated to a discussion of real science about both carbon dioxide and geologic history.
Dr. Will Happer (a friend of mine) said on Joe Rogan yesterday that climate hysteria has set back science by 50 years.
🗨️ “𝑊𝑒’𝑣𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑡 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑏𝑦 50 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑐 𝑓𝑜𝑐𝑢𝑠 𝑜𝑛 𝐶𝑂₂. 𝐼𝑓… pic.twitter.com/1bT79i4V2Q
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) October 21, 2025
Happer and Lindzen discuss how government funding mechanisms and political narratives shape climate research priorities. They argue that scientists who challenge mainstream views risk career marginalization and loss of funding. Rogan’s audience was treated to a robust review on how ideology and media framing have amplified what Happer calls a “CO₂ cult,” and how vital it is to question the reliability of predictive climate models.
As Happer noted during the show, the focus on CO2 has set science back 50 years. During the discussion, he cited that “settled science” once considered the Sun was comprised of phlogiston (a hypothetical fire-like substance once believed to exist within all combustible materials.)
…We’ve set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years, by this manic focus on CO₂. If your theory doesn’t have CO₂ in it, forget it. You won’t get funding. And so the true answer, to me, there was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was a phlogiston. There was this magic subject, nonexistent. But everyone to believed in phlogiston. It turned out it was nonsense.
Part of what delighted me the most was the focus on geologic history and the very neglected discussion of Earth’s glacial history. When Rogan noted the Earth’s temperature has always been subject to variation, Lindzen took a moment to review the actual numbers.
There’s something else about it, which I find funny, and you might have some insight into it. People pay no attention to the actual numbers. We’re not talking about big changes. In other words, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees, but that was because Most of the Earth was not affected, much of the Earth anyway, very much. But somebody says one degree, a half degree. What’s his name? [UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres] at the UN says, “The next half degree and we’re done for.” Doesn’t anyone ask? I have to agree. I mean, I deal with that between 9: 00 AM and 10: 00 AM.
Atmospheric Physicist Richard Lindzen & Joe Rogan on the dramatics of Climate Change:
ROGAN: “Earth’s temperature over time has always been up and down.”
LINDZEN: “Ppl say half a degree higher and we’re done for. They’re crazy. We deal with a half degree between 9am & 10am.” 😂 pic.twitter.com/VwWCqTCSKj
— Joe Rogan Recaps (@JoeRoganRecaps) October 21, 2025
Personally, my favorite part was when Happer referenced ancient Egyptian mummies.
But you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue. The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it. It’s all CO₂. Co₂ is the control. No, don’t confuse me with other possibilities. But nobody is quite sure about the Sun.
We have not got good records of the Sun for a long time, so we’re stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. One of the proxies is when the Sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10. These stick around for long, thousands of years or longer.
You can, from that infer, how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. They don’t give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant. It’s very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, this radioactivity that’s produced changes from year to year. If you don’t take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon-14 dating, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon-14 in it. You get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today.
Because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies. There’s a a very good historical record of that. So it’s clear the sun is always changing. And over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, and that’s particularly noticeable near the Arctic and high latitudes in the north.
For example, my father’s home in Scotland. I was a kid, I would walk up into the hill south of Edinburgh, and you could see these farms from the year 1000, where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can’t farm today. It’s too cold today, but it was clearly warming up in the year 2000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland.
So what caused those? It was not people burning oil and coal. And so I think the best guess as to what it was, it’s some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days because they do correlate with the carbon 14.
I would like to think that bit was an homage to my contributions in promoting sensible and serious discussion of climate science.
The show is awesome, and I encourage everyone to listen to it.
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It was clear that science had nothing to say about global warming right from the hockey stick curve long ago, for two reasons that intersected with what was known about other things:
1. You can’t solve the Navier Stokes equations, which govern fluid flow. In 2D, flows go to larger and larger scales, and there’s no problem with numerical calculations. In 3D, flows go to shorter and shorter scales, and no numerical calculation can do the physics because the grid size is always too coarse no matter how fine it is. (The mechanism is that in 3D, vortices can kink and break up, which they cannot do in 2D. Those fine scale flows resulting feed back on larger scale flows by way of constituting a change in viscosity – transport of x momentum in the y direction etc. – on the large scale flows. Actually a tensor, not a scalar)
So every calculation includes a term “effective viscosity” which does not appear in the Navier Stokes equation, and at that point stops doing physics. So no calculation is possible.
Weather forecasts are good for two or three days, which is how long it takes large scale vortices to kink. After that they’re no good.
2. You can’t say any historical change in temperature isn’t part of a long cycle and not a trend. A long cycle can’t be man-caused, a trend might be. The mathematical mechanism is that the linear system you have to solve to distinguish long cycles from trends develops eigenvectors of about 10 to the 30th power, which instantly multiplies any noise in the measurements and swamps the effort to distinguish. You need data that’s not shorter than they cycles that you want to eliminate, called the uncertainty principle in math (and quantum mechanics which has the same math but not other relation).
So there are no models and no data in support of man-caused global warming, in principle.
eigenvalues
And the measurements they’re using are imprecise and very often error prone. We’re talking about telemetry systems connecting tens of thousands of remote sensors, many operating in the harshest conditions you can imagine. Most people don’t appreciate how difficult it is to build and maintain such systems, and how ‘junky’ the data coming from them often is. Of course, the cultists wave this off with ‘we adjust/correct the data’ but these adjustments just serve as a choke-point in the process where they can introduce their bias into the base data.
Then there is the issue of data sparsity… in the network of temperature sensors used by the climate cult, the average sensor covers a land/sea area of something like 12,000 square miles. Yet they’re using this data to predict 100 years into the future, with the precision of a couple of degrees Celsius?
All true and relevant. However way beyond the comprehension of most Americans. At least 20% of the population can’t add 1/3 + 1/2 and express the answer as a rational fraction. Americans suffer from very poor education in anything mathematical. The K-12 public school math teachers lack comprehension about what they teach. Their excuse reveals the problem: “We teach students not subjects.” In other words, teaching is all about pedagogy and nothing else. Even private schools are little better. My offspring went to an elite, selective expensive private school. I sat in on their math and science courses. Miserable. The teachers lacked an understanding of the subject. Many students come out of high school thinking pi is exactly equal to 22/7. Ok I can forgive high school math teachers for not knowing about continued fractions. Even many engineers are ignorant of this mathematical theory. Any number, including the transcendentals like pi, can be approximated as a rational fraction. 22/7 is merely the first approximation. The others are more complex and not easy to remember. The digits of pi show no pattern when expressed in standard positional notation. But pi does show a pattern when expressed as a continued fraction. An obscure but amazing fact.
Get rid of the teachers unions. Outlaw them. Hire competent mathematicians like the Europeans used to do. Even the greats like Hilbert, and von Neumann taught high school at some point in their career.
“Their excuse reveals the problem: “We teach students not subjects.” In other words, teaching is all about pedagogy and nothing else.”
Education degrees are all about how to apply the chair’s shackles properly and prop the eyelids open effectively for the viewing of the movie, but nothing at all about what is in the movie.
“Two sixths plus three sixths equals five sixths.” Say that three times quickly.
The models themselves can’t provide any predictive authority. Even the UN cautions that the results spit out by models aren’t predictions. The trouble with models is that they are built by modelers who have preconceptions of how the climate works and changes over time. If a researcher thinks CO2 has an effect (there are good arguments that it doesn’t, for instance the geologic record shows the CO2 rises in response to warming, and not the other way around, there is also some – I think – very convincing science that CO2 causes warming up to a certain concentration, after which adding more CO2 has no effect), then he builds a model in which the virtual climate reacts to its virtual CO2 levels. If you had a theory that said the climate responds to the number of houses that are painted yellow, you’d build a model that had such a feedback mechanism in it. And, sure enough, if you increase the number of virtual yellow houses in the model, the virtual climate would respond. But that wouldn’t mean it isn’t utter nonsense.
Models can only show how a natural system might work. They represent theories and therefore prove nothing. Real-world observations are necessary to validate the theory. Even if the climate models are accurate, nobody has demonstrated, with real-world observations, that the actual climate behaves like their models.
Also note that there are literally dozens of climate models. Nearly every research group creates their own. This should inform us that no climate researchers have any faith in the climate models of any other researcher. What does that say about the reliability of the models?
“Science…requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results.”
Dr. Michael Crichton
Speaking at the California Institute of Technology, 2023
I understood that political science is the only science involved with climate when they started going back and “correcting” measurements made nearly a century ago.
The same can be said about the Wuflu hysteria. “Fifteen days to flatten the curve” became fifteen weeks which became fifteen months. We were ordered to wear face diapers in public, even though using a cloth mask to stop the spread was like expecting a chain-link fence to keep mosquitos out of your yard. We were ordered to believe the Wuflu shot would prevent transmission. Governments tried to imprison us in our homes indefinitely – unless you wanted to riot, rape, burn, loot and murder in the holy name of St George of Floyd.
The wild overreaction to the Wuflu by the medical profession has caused damage to their reputation that will take years to recover from – if ever.
Don’t forget the 6 ft radius we were told to adhere to and that number was pulled out someone’s ass. The more “Scientists” that leave the CDC in protest the better.
It is settled science that the earth has wobbles in its orbit. That the sun has periods of intense solar activity. And both of those cycles influence warming and cooling trends. It’s also settled science that we have had multiple glacial periods and multiple warming periods. All without and fossil fuels being extracted and used by humans. “Climate change” is used as a cudgel to extract research dollars that allow scientists to craft a narrative to keep the money flowing. To quote Joe Pesci in Casino, “it’s always about the dollars”.
And that the magnet pole flips at times. That worries me more than theoretical global climate change because when the pole flips, the Earth gets a good cosmic ray bath for a century or so.
Say what you want about Rogan
He has often very very good guests, such as these two
He’s stil a lefty in many ways, California and Austin, the entertainment business will do that to you
But he’s generally very curious and open minded
He indeed helped get President Trump elected
Love this article. For the record, decades ago ( first career) I taught 9-11 year olds a basic 9-week geology unit. They loved the fun stuff – volcanos, earthquake movies, clouds, etc. They learned the correct definitions of climate and weather. We even covered the absolutely basic fact regarding the exchange of CO2 and O between plants and animals. They got it – made sense (duh). I hope they remembered.
My hope is they can still recall it and figure out this “cl
Even back as a teen I questioned the validity of radioactive dating relying on the assumption that the rate of radioactive decay was constant. Perhaps in high school a simplified version was presented to me, but all I could think about was “how can they assert that the rate of decay was constant and couldn’t vary?”
The time invariance of the radioactive decay constant follows from quantum mechanics and observation. It’s a property of the atomic nucleus and not influenced by the electron cloud. Observations of natural reactors like the Oklo site show the constant has remained constant for two billion years. Simply put, atoms don’t age. Their hazard rate is a constant. All this follows from the properties of the exponential distribution, which is memoryless.
No one has observed anything for two billion years – it’s an inference at best, not an observation.
Not being critical, but you must educate yourself about how we know what we know about radioactive elements, their decay rates, and their decay products (some of which are themselves radioactive). The science is quite sound, based on theory that has been confirmed by observation over a broad range of disciplines that are concerned with such elements. It’s far more complex than can be explained here, but our knowledge about these elements does, in fact, come from being able to trace the physics behind them over billions of years, both in the earth’s crust and in astronomical observations (as energetic events in space that produce some of these elements that took place billions of years ago can be observed today as the light from the events is only now reaching us). Nuclear powerplants and atomic weapons work because our understanding these elements is rather complete. What you’re suggesting, that somehow radioactive decay isn’t as constant as we think it is, if true, would mean our devices (bombs, power plants, atomic clocks, etc.) wouldn’t work, or, if they did, would perform irregularly, making them useless.
Radioactive decay is constant. But the amount of it in the air isn’t.
??
funding has always been political
so the real true only legit antidote is
no funding via tax money
military courts treasury>>that is the job we the patriot people give the power to the government
just b/c lefty has twisted the truth to meet their goals is no reason to ride their coattails
I recall that some time back (20 years or more?), a grad student in Colorado wanted to study some particular squirrel, but couldn’t get funding. Then he submitted for a grant for a study about how increasing CO2 levels affected the squirrels, and, voilà, he received funding.
well
thats just nuts
But the researcher in the next lab got three times the money for studying how CO2 levels were turning squirrels gay.
We have a little fishing cabin on the Texas coast with the same square footage as a Toyota Prius that is 185’ from Aransas Bay. The front room turns into the bedroom at night and we bought it in 1973. In the last 57 years Aransas Bay hasn’t risen one iota.
I need a lot less to demonstrate its a scam.
The entire ‘adjustment’ crap gives it away.
REAL science wants to use the most accurate data measurement possible. Instruments should be regularly tested and calibrated for accuracy, and replaced regularly.
The very fact that they continue ‘adjusting’ their obsolete crap sensors gives away that this has nothing to do with science.
When they revealed that all the other planets in the solar system are warming, it outed the global warming hoax for the bs it is.
Those poor Martian polar bears!
Don’t know much about science, but this from Michael Crichton, from a 2003 speech, “Aliens cause Global Warming” at the California Institute of Technology, has always impressed:
“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
[Crichton gave a number of examples where the scientific consensus was completely wrong for many years.]
“… Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E = mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”
http://s8int.com/crichton.html or http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122603134258207975 or http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
My brother went to UCSD revelle in 1976 and his Prof revelle had the class calculated all ice melting over whole world and oceans rise only 3 tenths of an inch. So there u are, Al Gore failed divinity student
One factoid that has always persuaded me that MIT was not the woke hellhole many other big-name universities had become is that they kept Lindzen — a “climate change denier” of international repute — on their faculty long after other Unis would have cancelled him out of a job. Sadly, thats not the same thing as MIT not having leapt aboard the popular climate-change bandwagon, because they clearly have,
Where people live has gotten hotter. This is due to removing trees and adding buildings, roads, etc which absorb sun energy. The problem is that this is also where the thermometers live, so we can see an increase in temperature simple by altering local environment where the data is collected. The good news is that where people live is probably well under 1% of the planets land surface, which do not see a surge in temp due to civilization.
That was the quickest 2 hours. Such an interesting conversation.